EE Times: Open-source C Compiler Targets FPGAs

“Seeking to eliminate the need for detailed hardware expertise
for FPGA design, a research group at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL) here has developed an open-source C compiler for
reconfigurable logic. Called Streams-C, the compiler doesn’t
generally yield the performance of RTL design but claims to boost
productivity by 10 to 100 fold.

“Streams-C accepts a subset of the C programming language,
performs behavioral synthesis, and outputs synthesizable RTL VHDL
code. It currently targets Xilinx Virtex-2000 devices on Annapolis
Microsystems’ Firebird board, but claims to be easily
retargetable.

“The compiler was developed under Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency funding under the direction of Maya Gokhale,
project leader for deployable adaptive processing systems at LANL.
Gokhale said she’d been developing compilers since 1988, and wrote
a compiler for the Splash machine, one of the first reconfigurable
computers…”

Complete
Story